Jane Davis's Blog, page 4

This week saw the launch of my tenth novel, Small Eden, which tells the story of Robert Cooke, who created a pleasure garden the the memory of his two infant sons. In keeping with the theme of nature and of gardens in particular, I’m delighted to welcome Hannah Powell, author of The Cactus Surgeon, to...
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In our back garden, almost on the boundary with our neighbour’s garden, stands a lone horse chestnut tree. It has been here longer than our house, and our house first appeared on an Ordnance Survey map in 1903. This is the time of year when the tree is just coming into leaf and, as they...
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I’m delighted to welcome Ivan Wainewright to Virtual Book Club, my occasional interview series in which authors have the opportunity to pitch their novels to your book club. Ivan lives in Kent with his partner, Sarah, and their neurotic rescue Staffie, Remi. Before moving to Kent, he lived in North London, Leeds and Singapore. He...
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The discovery that Mitcham – only three miles from where I live – was once the opium-growing capital of the UK made me decide that Small Eden’s leading man, Robert Cooke, should be a physic (or physick) gardener. The term has fallen out of use, but it means a grower of medicinal or healing plants....
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No eden, small or large, would be complete without birds. Several species feature in Small Eden. First, we have the songbirds in the hedgerows and the pleasure gardens. There’s Hettie’s grey African parrot Fairfax (a personality in his own right). And then we have the green ring-necked parakeets Robert buys for his pleasure garden. I...
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My tenth novel is a personal one. With Small Eden, I have written yet more characters into my personal landscape – the land on which our cottage is built. When we moved into the cottage, the vendors told us that it had been the gatehouse for an estate, and this was certainly the received wisdom,...
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The post Small Eden: exclusive preview appeared first on Jane Davis • Author of Half-truths and White Lies, I Stopped Time and more....

I felt very strongly that the cover for Small Eden should have a strong local anchor. The inspiration for my tenth novel was the cottage I have called home for the past twenty-one years, built (as far as we’ve been able to ascertain) as the ticket office for pleasure gardens which opened at the turn...
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What if the person you thought you’d lost forever walked back into your life? That’s the question Katy Regan asks in her latest novel, How to Find Your Way Home. Once I discovered that the book involved birdwatching, a subject I wrote about in A Funeral for an Owl, I knew that I needed to...
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Imagine, if you will, discovering of a cache of photographs; the instinctive knowledge that what you are holding in your hands is rare and precious. You won’t be the first to experience this feeling, but that hardly matters. It will feel as though you are. Anthony Penrose grew up thinking that he had one famous...
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When I released I Stopped Time, it was to test the waters. And by ‘the waters’, I mean what was then the brave new world of self-publishing. I commissioned a cover design, choosing a photograph that was appropriate to the era and included the themes of time and photography. The result was in keeping with...
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